Thursday, January 29, 2015

Last year my 12-year-old niece and I started a “reading club”—it’s an exclusive club, just the two of us. It’s
been a lot of fun, and it’s given me an interesting insight into her life and the
things she thinks about. It’s also given me a chance to read some wonderful
young-adult novels that I would never have known about otherwise.

Last summer three of the books
we read were A Wrinkle in Time (which
I had read when I was a teen-ager), Where
the Mountain meets the Moon, and Tuck Everlasting, and an interesting theme
emerged from these three very different books: an understanding of Taoist
principles, in particular the yin-yang aspect of life.

What I realized was that I have
a tendency to dream about and work for a life where there are no problems; a
utopian vision of sunshine and happiness everlasting. And I don’t think I’m
alone with this tendency. We dream about our relationships—our fairy-tales end
with the couple riding off into the sunset, living “happily ever after.” Our
politicians prey on this thinking, promising us that they will deliver the
policies that will solve all of our problems. Many of us work hard all our
lives, building a retirement fund that we imagine will finance living the life
of our dreams, free of stress and hassle.

But these dreams always set us
up for disappointment, because they are based on the flawed belief that there
can be a situation with just one side of the yin-yang polarity—that we can have
good without bad, happy without sad, love without grief, joy without
heartbreak.

Reading these books left me with
this piece of wisdom: everything is a mix of good and bad. Allow for that,
embrace it. Quit your pursuit of that unattainable, nothing-but-happiness
rainbow.

When my niece and I discussed A Wrinkle in Time, I mentioned that once
again we were hearing the Taoist message. She said, “Mom and I went on a hike
this morning and I asked her, ‘Do you like going up or down better?’ and she
replied, ‘if you do one you’re going to have to do the other!’”

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Is economics a hard science,
like physics? Or is it more like sociology and history? Many economists would
like us to believe that the first is true, that economics is now firmly rooted
in mathematics and empirical evidence.

In Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists have Damaged America and theWorld, author Jeff Madrick asserts that the myth that economics is a
science is one of the ideas that have inflicted damage on our country. In
particular, he writes that for all the talk about being a science, many
economists don’t care much about how their theories work in the real world. In
Paul Krugman’s review of the book, he
wrote, “Economists presented as reality an idealized vision of free markets,
dressed up in fancy math that gave it a false appearance of rigor.”

It seems to me it’s time to do an
empirical test of economic theories; an objective analysis of real-world
results. For forty years from about 1930-1970, the policies of John Maynard Keynes
were followed. Keynesianism included a strong role for government in regulating
business and the markets.

In the 1970s a different
economic model began to gain popularity, and in the U.S. the main proponent was
Milton Friedman, so I’ll call this model Friedmanism. This model claimed that
markets work best without government interference, because markets had an
inherent tendency to always find perfect states of equilibrium. By 1980, with
the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, this new economic
thinking began to dominate western economic thinking.

We now have forty years of
Friedmanism to contrast with the forty years of Keynesianism. How do those two
periods compare? Keynesianism produced strong economic growth and a relatively
equal society with no major financial crashes. Friedmanism has led to poor
economic growth, an increasingly unequal society, and regular and painful
financial crashes. Interestingly, somehow these crashes are, in the end, only
painful to the middle and lower classes; they are strangely rewarding to the
1%.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

What distinguishes humanity from animals? Many attributes
have been proposed over the years, including language and tool-use, but most
have been discarded once it was discovered how widespread their use was in the
animal kingdom. One candidate still survives, and that is the capacity for
abstract, symbolic thought.

We take symbolic thought for granted. For example the idea that
I can write my thoughts in this blog and you can (hopefully) understand them
seems unremarkable, but when you take a step back the capability is quite
astonishing. In his film “Waking Life,” the director Richard Linklater has a
character describe the wonder of symbolic thought: it’s easy to imagine how we
came up with a word for “tiger,” and a phrase that means “tiger attacking from
behind!” But how did humans come up with a word for “frustration”? That’s an
abstract concept, with no obvious analogue in objective reality to point to.

All of human civilization is based on this ability to
conceptualize.

What an intriguing period in human history, when we were
first capable of symbolic thought! There’s no way of knowing exactly when this
happened, but the evidence of art on the walls of caves allows us to give it a
minimum date—by the time humans were capable of painting images of animals they
were obviously capable of thinking symbolically.

For many years, it was thought that the oldest cave
paintings were in southern France, in the Chauvet caves. Werner Herzog produced
a documentary about the art, “Cave
of Forgotten Dreams,” and watching it, I was deeply moved by the power of
the imagery produced by humans 30,000 years ago.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

I am a great fan of the Three Stooges. Their earliest films
were made in the 1930s, and most of the characters they played were working
class men struggling to make a living and occasionally interacting with the
wealthy in ridiculous ways. In an era when Hollywood answered the Great
Depression with glamorous movie stars and movies like “Gold Diggers of 1933”
(the opening song is “We’re
in the Money”; the film is well-worth watching for the Busby Berkeley dance
choreography), the Three Stooges must have provided a hilarious satirical
depiction of ordinary life for the average moviegoer.

Not long ago I purchased a DVD set of all their short films
from 1934-1942. Watching them in order over a period of a couple of months, it
occurred to me that you could teach a class on the Great Depression using the
Three Stooges as the foundation. Because they often portray workmen, the
Stooges are often in people’s homes, particularly kitchens, and I was struck by
the difference in kitchen appliances over the course of these few years. In one
of their famous films, “An Ache in Every Stake” (1941) they are ice
deliverymen; even in 1941 people still had iceboxes. The ovens start out
looking like modified woodstoves. By the last film of 1942, “Sock-a-Bye Baby”
they are in a kitchen with an electric refrigerator and fancy gas stove, and the
kitchen looks gleamingly modern.

There are also references to the New Deal, including a visit
to the Oval Office where the Stooges thank President Roosevelt.

About Me

I'm a philosopher, writer, videographer, and entrepreneur. In 2013 I've released a new book, "We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity." I'm the co-author with my husband Arthur Hancock of "The Game of God: Recovering Your True Identity.